Some said DeLila’s imagination was too fantastic; she wasn’t grounded in reality.

One said DeLila would never amount to much.

Another said she was likely to one day just flit away and never come back.

You know what, that’s just what she did.

Weekly Photo Challenge: State of Mind and reposted today for Magic. I wish more people would, if just for a portion of their day, use a state of mind more like DeLila, who I invented here. We could just pop ourselves into a bubble and let the breeze carry us somewhere else. I have no doubt many bloggers practice this way nonetheless. I used this photo recently in another post but it felt appropriate for this week’s challenge. I love the weekly challenges, I ponder them all week and look at my world through a different lens because of the themes.

By the way, after I composed this flash fiction I made a quick internet search for the name Delila which I chose for no good reason. I found this story and songs of Delila, a Kurdish song writer, drummer, protester, warrior woman who was killed by a Turkish soldier. She was not at all like the character I invented here. Her music is delightful and mesmerizing, though I don’t understand the lanuage of her lyrics.

Coffee brews in the press and I have a little time before I open the office at 7. Let’s check the sourdough sponge set up last night. Look at the mark where it raised when the yeast were in their feeding frenzy and reproducing like crazy before death, like any organism. And then the sponge fell as it should after the protein in the flour was devoured. Oh! those bubbles! Looks just right and smells like beer. The surface is moving with gasses. I’m hoping bread at nearly sea level, where I am now, will turn out as well as that at 350 feet when I’m home. Natural yeast can be fussy. This should turn into rye bread like the piece in the bag. Tomorrow. I add more bread flour and water, cover the bowl with a small plate again, and walk away to open the office.

A few hunters stop in for a key or to exchange one for a different location. I take a reservation by phone. The Andrus Wildlife Management Area has gates to 6 different drainages or roads. Sunday morning is not very busy but in the evening I recorded surveys with 9 keys that were dropped off. It’s been a 3 day weekend for those who didn’t work Veterans Day holiday.

Today I take the chairs off the table and make room for water color painting. Seating for 12, this could be the mead hall or else it serves a whole lot of castle servants. What a great place to spread out projects. It’s overcast, might rain, so I go for a walk to collect leaves from different types of trees.

The idea is to trace a leaf and paint a landscape inside the shape. Water color takes patience, just like sourdough baking. While paint dries between layers I make a vegetable and rice curry soup with fresh tomatoes I brought from my garden.

Sometime in the afternoon I add more flour and water to the sourdough and by bedtime it has bubbled up to the top of the bowl. In a larger bowl I mix the dry ingredients with my fingers and then stir in the fermented sponge. For this rye bread I substitute rye flour for the whole wheat amount and add 3 tablespoons of dark baking chocolate to give it stronger flavor and a rich color. Rosemary, yes, chopped up and added for interest instead of caraway seeds. I hold back on the olive oil, using less than a full table spoon. I hope it will rise well. I stir it and then knead it a little in the bowl but the flour mixture doesn’t integrate well with the wet. It looks mottled. Hoping for the best I cover the bowl with a big loose fitting plate and a light dish cloth and leave it on the counter over night.

A friend called just when I needed to walk away from a painting and we talked for a long long time. All the while I studied skulls and antlers and horns that have been gathered from the wildlife area. They are on the walls and coffee tables and window sills. Everything needs dusting. If this were not home to a wildlife management area anyone could wonder about someone who would put bones around their living room. As a naturalist they interest me. As a writer they inspire me.

I’ve been advised to start stories not at the beginning but somewhere else, perhaps the middle or the end. I’ll share a few journal notes this week from my experiences as volunteer gatekeeper for a wildlife management area in Hells Canyon. Today is not the first.

I’ve been squatting long enough my toe joints hurt but I don’t want to move. Turkeys following in line, spread to a V, marching knees high, advance quickly toward me as I crouch beneath an old black walnut tree. I want to become so much part of the environment they don’t fear me, they forget me and they move closer unaware. I can’t take it any longer. Before bracing my weight with my finger tips I check the ground in case there is bear scat. Don’t touch ground here without looking. It’s everywhere. All around the house, in the gravel, up the banks beneath the thicket of wild ancient fruit trees. Shit. That’s what it is. Why do we call it scat? Bears shit in orchards. They shit anywhere they please and don’t much think about it. I think. Bearshit. It’s everywhere I look. Or step. Or kneel.

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Day 1 – First day living at the ranch to check out keys to the gates. I arrived at 3:30, no staff at the house yet so I took out my camera. The sun was about to go behind the mountain. I love the sounds here, the creek and turkeys and then deep silence in the evening.

Day 2 – evening – Turkeys are somewhat scary the way they walk and peck at each other, wings spread wide and beating the air. When they roost in tall trees over the creek I feel like they might dive at me. But they don’t. But they might. I feel it. Sometimes I am typing this story, these notes, and I see a shadow cruise swiftly past the window out in the yard, the air space over the yard. It’s a turkey, but might it be something else? It’s dusk, what’s the science word for this time of day becoming night? It feels like when I am walking up my road at home and swallows are darting after insects and then for a brief time when it’s almost too dark to detect images as they truly are I sense bats the same size darting among the swallows, all of them feasting on flying insects. It’s a feeding frenzy. And soon the swallows are gone and it’s only the bats and mammoth moths devouring bugs all night. I need monsters flitting about doing the same thing. I need imaginary predators imitating my pets imitating predators, waiting so patiently, so alertly, so ready to snap up their prey.

That sound? Has something with wings landed on my roof peak? Is it waiting for me to forget it’s presence, unwary, and go to the wood pile or to my truck for a bucket of paints? Will I forget it’s there, let it be part of the environment until cautionless I walk out into the dark of night, witless and mindless as a turkey, and it swoops down and snaps off my head leaving my neck spurting blood and my legs still walking as though they haven’t yet received the message they have no head managing their performance? It could happen.

BTW I made it to the truck and back fetching a small jar of sourdough starter I had left behind the seat. Still I left the flashlight there. The moon is getting fairly full. No matter. I’m writing horror snippets and at this point something very big with wings is surely perched on the roof patiently waiting like any wise predator for its unwary prey to emerge mindlessly from the door. And I’ve learned that turkeys talking in the night sound something like wolves.

I’m back from 20 minutes timed writing. Things have been happening here, strange sounds from a grave sized hole we dug for a tree last fall, now filled with muddy water, lights in the sky, owls hooting, boulders I swear were not on the ridge last fall before the snow, a flash of my stepdad’s plaid shirt, his arm on the arm of my wicker love seat on the front deck, its back to the window. He died in 2008. I look away from the pane, realize what I have glimpsed and look back. Nothing there. But it felt so real. I’m sure it was there. The old dog’s frequent nose bleeds. All that blood, it is from the dog, right? That sort of thing. No doubt all can be explained but it’s fun to let my imagination lead the way and get something on the page. Since I spent a lot of money and time in a horror writers workshop in Transylvania last summer, I might as well practice the writing craft, fiction that is. It is fiction, right?

Don’t expect Me to mark My place as your Days dawn and pass. I’m not responsible for keeping track of Hours and Minutes. I’m never on Time, except for Some Times. If Time means something to you, count on Me to arrive in My own good Time. I linger in Moments, suspending Myself to make perfect whatever it is I’m doing at the Time instead of rushing on to some Appointment that you’ve set for some certain Hour. I’m Time and I don’t make appointments. You note Instants of my coming and going in Hours on your coo coo clocks. Coo coo. Coo coo.

I’m never late. You are. Then you hurry to make up for losing Me. How can I be lost? Time doesn’t get lost. I’m here all along no matter what; it’s you who is Late or Early, not Time. I just be Myself right here, right Now, and you scuttle all around Me, trying to keep Me. Wherever you feel you need to be going, you’re certainly not going to get there on Me.

I’m not in control of anything. I don’t heal everyThing. What a trite meaningless phrase. “Time heals everything.” Oh, really? Who do you think I am? I can’t heal you, only you can heal yourself if you let Me help you.

I hold no one on a leash. I’m far too busy to stop everything for the Moment. Children and Old people trained Me to hold on, wait just a Minute, or several Moments for them to get ready for some event, to get in the mood, to get dressed, to cry or laugh, to hop or step to the open car door. The young and the old, they take so much of Me! I say give them more of Me! Spend more of Me with them. Act more like them and you’ll see that I’m hardly noticed at all. And to them I mean everything.

Lots of people are driven by Me. I steer the locomotive. If you’re not on My train and you get left Behind what loss? I only left you in the Moment. The Moment is a train depot. Stay right here and forget about Me. Look around you. Notice a bird nest or a puddle frozen over with a thin crust of ice. Go ahead, stay with Me and study it. Touch it with your toe. Fracture that ice and see how it looks Then. I’m right here with you right Now. Get to know the place where you stand right here, right Now. I’ll stay with you.

I like to take little trips to Ancient civilizations. I like to see My ancestors who lived before Now and those who haven’t lived Yet. I like to see paintings that haven’t been painted and hear songs that haven’t been sung. Yet.

Stop blaming Me for changing things. I’m a scientist observing what Is, what Was, and hypothesizing what Might be. Not how things could be if I changed something in the Past or Present. I don’t change things, I just stay Present and Things move around Me.

I am a continuum. I am Infinite. I have no Beginning. I have no End. I sing and chime in many voices and never all on the same Beat. I’ve kept music and lives orderly. But wait. If I’m not here, what loss? Who cares? Let Disorder take My place!

About this post

This photo is for the Weekly Photo Challenge: Time. I wanted to capture the image of a clock taking its own picture, its self-portrait. Happy accident, the lense flare and dust particles showing the magicalness of daylight. Afterall, daylight is a way we mark time.

This writing is from a writers workshop I participated in. The assignment was to write a self-portrait of something immaterial. What could be less material than Time? I scraped this writing out of my archives. I don’t feel it’s complete Yet. Give it Time.

“There’s the idea of fiction as a safe laboratory for exploring ourselves in our world, for experimenting with a persona or character in social organization, for trying on costumes and running a social model until it breaks down. There is all that. One positive aspect is that maybe this awareness and recording will lead us to live more interesting lives. . . . We’ll develop the ability to imagine our lives in finer and finer detail. . . If nothing else, maybe learning to write will force us to take a closer look at everything, to really see it.

What if some writer comes up with a new way to tell a story, a new way to live?”

From Chuck Palahniuk in Stranger Than Fiction

Well, Chuck, I say more than one writer has done just that, found a new way to tell a story. I recently discovered Kevin Mowrer, a Steampunk world creator who tells stories on a variety of formats for print and elctronic media in which the reader or audience gets to interact with the story. He calls his new way to tell a story meta-story and defines itquite differently I did when discussing Neil Gaiman’s technique of talking about the story within in the story. Mowrer says

“Meta-story is the craft of developing a story and/or narrative so that it treats many of the different media formats as one seamless storytelling canvas.

. . . Interestingly, we live in a rapidly changing age where the audience often seeks to expand their contact with a story that is meaningful to them by looking for it in multiple forms. They read the book and want to spend time every week with the characters they’ve fallen in love with on TV. With those stories that have deep and unique worlds, they want to explore them for themselves beyond the linear experience of a book, a movie or a TV show through deep online worlds and other forms of gaming and site-based experiences.”

Kevin’s intent is to create or expand stories “organically and authentically” to fulfill this new “contiguous story landscape”.

“The media narrative forms, in all their varied richness, are quite alive and evolving at the edges and audiences are redefining what it means to adopt and experience meaningful and deep stories.

Stories are different than direct conversation or debate in that the storyteller is making a contract with the audience to willingly suspend active exchange and profoundly immerse themselves within our narratives and worlds in the hope and belief that we, as creators, will move them with an unexpected and nuanced truth and narrative insight.”

As a reader and writer, I want to explore what Chuck and Kevin express here about the craft of creating fiction. I love reading Steampunk stories. Do I want to write one? Maybe. Do I want to craft a story for a game or web site or movie? Maybe. Chuck Palahnuik challeges each of us to write fiction.

“Instead of wasting more time or money on another crappy book or movie, how about you take a stab at the job? I mean, why not?”

I’ve been nominated by incahootswithmuddyboots for the 3 Day Quote Challenge. Check out her blog. Impressive photographs! My first 2 day’s quotes are also about writing or story telling, by Neil Gaiman and Susan Strauss and Chuck Palahnuik. See them here and here, along with who I nominated yesterday.

The rules to this challenge are:

Post on 3 consecutive days

Post one to three quotes per day (They can be much shorter than mine!)

Challenge three different bloggers each day

Today I nominate these bloggers for the 3 Day Quote challenge. Check out their blogs!

“My pet theory about the success of Fight Club is that it provided a structure for people to be together. People want to find new ways for connecting. Look at American Quilt and The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood and Joy Luck Club. These are all books that present a structure, making a quilt or playing Mahjong, providing a structure that allows people to be together and share their stories. All these books are short stories bound together by a shared activity.”

“The world is made of people telling stories. . . . Any long story, any novel, is just a combination of short stories.”

“Instead of wasting more time or money on another crappy book or movie, how about you take a stab at the job? I mean, why not?”

From Chuck Palahniuk in Stranger Than Fiction, a collection of essays and journalistic pieces that prove that real life has imagination beaten cold in the strangeness and wonder departments.

I’ve been nominated by incahootswithmuddyboots for the 3 Day Quote Challenge. Check out her blog. Impressive photographs! My first day’s quotes are also about writing or story telling, by Neil Gaiman and Susan Strauss. See them here along with who I nominated yesterday.

The rules to this challenge are:

Post on 3 consecutive days

Post one to three quotes per day

Challenge three different bloggers each day

Today I nominate these bloggers for the 3 Day Quote challenge. Check out their blogs!

Why do I write? I consider this question several times a year. Why do I write now when I’m not getting paid for my work? And writing is work, regardless of how enjoyable it might feel.

Today I write because it takes me away. Whether fiction, poetry, or nonfiction in those moments while I am writing I’m not here; I’m somewhere else. Something of a meditation, writing pulls and pushes, sorts, brings forth and reveals thoughts and feelings. It’s cleansing. Writing sets me right with myself, puts things in order in myself.

Today I write because my readers respond. Your feedback inspires me. Your appreciation of language encourages me to keep writing, keep exploring ways of using language. Everybody likes praise, right? It’s like applause for a performance, the interchange between musician and dancer, the interaction between writer and reader.

Today I write because I can construct worlds, places, characters, and events. I write to clear my heart and my heartache. Most of my writing doesn’t get read and usually that doesn’t matter. The act of creating is stronger than the need for showing. But, oh, to have audience and feedback, that matters, too.

Today I write because I love the art of language. I love the challenges of using nothing but language to express a scene with sensory images, to show a vignette or a feeling.

Today I write to explore genres, to bend and reshape genres, to break the rules. I write for the trial. I write to keep my mind in practice and focused.

Today I’m not writing to be published; I’m not writing for pay. I write because I can communicate with those people who will take the time to read, who have enough endurance to stay with words and ideas. I write because Uncle Clarence and my grandparents wrote letters to me since I was a child and they read my letters and responded, as if what I wrote was important, as if it mattered. Connecting with people, with family and strangers, that matters.

I write because it matters.

This post is my response to today’s writing prompt in the Writing 101 course, challenging me to write a post a day. The photos are my contribution to this week’s photo challenge: connected. The poetry magnets poem is “connected” to my fridge and more words connect my guests with me as they leave unique word arrangements for me to find after they’ve gone. The hand written letter is the first of many that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother, courting her during World War 1. I started a story stimulated by the series of letters, the Cat Rock Letters. I haven’t progressed very far with that project but I hope to get back to it this month.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a blogger, a writer. So tell me, please, I want to know why do you write?

Beneath the south arch supporting the medieval shop rested an ancient looking crone. Her scarf tied loosely under her chin adorned her complicated face. Spongy sandals comforted her toes. She dressed in tidy dark skirt and vest. The tiny woman smoked her cigarette and tilted a bunch of white hydrangea and gold mums toward me.

Her face was carved in abstract creases shaped by time. The wrinkles gave her the look of wisdom and suffering that comes from experiencing life with unguarded emotions. But her folded skin was not a true guide to her spirit. It was her eyes looking straight into mine, not with insight but with mischief and delight and recognition, that hinted at some joy she felt in that moment. She sipped her espresso from the little crimson cup and balanced it back on a stone at her feet next to an enormous yellow shopping bag, a bright sunflower printed on its shiny surface.

Between us stretched the cobblestone street that made our joints ache. Perhaps we noticed each other because we were the only two women in Shighisoara who wore sensible shoes this hot afternoon. But I feel it was something else that brought us together. She sat in the threshold, one door open to the long shady corridor behind her leading to a locked iron gate, the other door closed next to her showing the engraved pattern gracing its edge. The old architecture of the square juxtaposed with that of this knarly sweet person spoke to me.

I asked if I could photograph her and she nodded and sat straighter, posing. When she saw her images on my camera screen she smiled in silent approval. But I know I heard her say, “Today was a good day.”

Bran Castle might be one of several structures that inspired Bram Stoker’s setting for his dark novel Dracula. Some of the photos I made here feel eerie. I messed with this image a little in Adobe Photoshop CS4 to see if how I could alter it for this week’s photo challenge, creepy. It’s the shaded north wall of the Transylvanian castle as I approached it. Which of these images creeps you out the most?

Creepy North Wall

This is only slightly adjusted for tone and contrast, mostly the way the picture came out of the camera. I like the glowing light reflected in the windows.

Creepy North Wall 1

A little more adjustment brings out some details and enhances the sky slightly. See more shadows in the stones and a brighter whiter wall.

Creep North Wall 2

A little more monotone look, or black and white.

Creepy North Wall 3

Tinted, oldish look.

Creepy North Wall 4

Tint is adjusted and the color range changes. Using the curves tool, now we see contrast between warm and cool tones.

Creepy North Wall 5

I adjusted a previous version with the level or straighten tool (in crop menu) to see how it would look if the roofline or floorline were leveled, creating a 90 degree horizon line. With just a very slight adjustment, I can’t see the horizon line much more level, if any. But I like what happened to the cloud effect. From my position on the stone path when I captured the image I doubt if it would have been possible to get a 90 degree horizon. I would have had to climb out the rock wall to get that perspective. Not allowed, I’m sure. The approach perspective was likely an intention of the architect. Cameras were not handy when the fortress was erected atop the rock, but the image in the eye of guests or invaders would have subtly influenced the mood. Yikes!

So, does one of these images strike you as more creepy than the others?

She put a page of monologue notes into the draft on her computer and then crumpled the crisp yellow paper and let it drop at her feet. Another page, same thing. One after another she crumpled the hand written notes after she added them to her story. It felt so good to make progress a little at a time and to hear the sound of destruction as she dismissed used up ideas. Ah. And what to do with the little pile of crumples? She rocked in the old stuffed chair where she worked on her deck. Aimlessly she tossed the pages over the rail onto the garden, letting them fall with the breeze. Food for the compost pile. Paper is good for compost, right? Aren’t our ideas worthy of decomposing and nourishing the food we eat and the muse that drives us to create? Ideas and words and stories grow like straberries, and mustard, and chard, and weeds. They thrive in manure and mud. She watched the wind lift a page over the garden fence and carry it off across the river, down the valley, over the hill, into the ocean, and down the throat of a bad-child-eating-sea-monster. Every story knows where it should go. A writer needs know when to let it wander, not that it’s gone stray, just finding its way.

A pop of red blossoms through the greenery! A tall stalk of clustered trumpets glowed like amber and rubies in the sunset. LaWrynn was mesmerized. Ah, to be a humming bird this evening. But she had come to this world without wings, and though her feet were enormous for her miniature stature, she was thankful for a small nose that she felt made her lookquite adorable.

She inhaled deeply while she stretched her arms up toward the pinnacle of crimson glass buds towering above the flower and even over the tree tops. Up, up, up to her tallest. A salute to the sun. She exhaled as she slowly stretched her torso down toward the florescent stems. Red stripes encircled them, warning her of the plant’s phantom poison. She wanted to climb a shiny trunk anyway. She wanted to balance on the bloom’s stigma and view the world from this so special place. LaWrynn continued her exhale, stretching down until she touched the soft moss covered ground. Spreading her fingers open alongside her toes she pushed one leg back and then the other extending her body into plank pose. Then she felt herself collapse to the ground and roll onto her back. She laid her arms straight out from her sides forming a T shape. Breathing rhythmically LaWrynn studied the clouds. She imagined ships and snails and faces in their strange shapes.

Suddenly a giant bud sprang open. Its stem swayed in response to theabrupt disturbance. Shejerked into the fetal position and then scrambled for safety behind an emerald bush. Had the blossom heard her thoughts? Had she spoke aloud her desire?

Beyond the sheltering leaves she saw the sun sliding behind the green house roof. Shefelt an impulse to run inside before the doors locked for the night else she feared she would spend thedamp chill darkness among giant insects whose homes she suspected were hidden within the enchanted glass garden.

About this post

I took a vacation away from my pretty-much-isolated home in the Rocky Mountains and ignored blogging for a couple of weeks. In that time on my travels I gathered photos and writing ideas. The day before my vacation Doug Warren invited me to join the Five Photos, Five StoriesChallenge. I agreed to do it, but told Doug I wouldn’t get on it until I returned from my trip. Here is my first post in this challenge. It’s an Ekphrastic writing. That means the writing is inspired by or related to an art piece, be it visual, music, performance, architecture or other art forms. This art inspired this vignette in the collection of stories I’ve started about a spirit who emerged from the other world through a badger hole on the first night of Samhain. She gets stuck in this world because she failed to get back through the portal on the third night. You can read more about LaWrynn, who is as small as a wren, https://skybluedaze.wordpress.com/lawrynn-stories-fantasy-and-celtic-lore/.

I made the photos of glass flowers at Chihuly’s Glass Garden. It’s a permanent exhibit at the Seattle Center. I was leaving the center after a day with family and didn’t have time to linger if I wanted to catch the ferry for the home trip to the Olympic Peninsula so I took some shots into the sun as we passed it. Chihuly is a fabulous glass artist and teacher. You can find out more about him and the Glass Garden http://www.chihulygardenandglass.com/

The Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge rules require you to post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or simply a short paragraph – it’s entirely up to you.

Then each day, nominate another blogger to carry on this challenge. Don’t forget to tell the blogger you have nominated. Accepting the challenge is entirely up to the person nominated, it is not a command. And actually everyone can join in. So feel free to if you like the idea.

I am nominating “GonnaBeAWriter” for my first day’s nomination. I think she’s a deep thinker and avid writer. I haven’t seen many photos with her writing but from what I see in her banner, no doubt she can do this. Here’s the link to her blog. Look her up for some good reads. https://xavanessa.wordpress.com/

Hey there!

Thanks for stopping in! I hope I feature topics that inform or entertain you, or inspire you. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I write and make art about what is close to home and close to my heart, the people and places in Idaho's Rocky Mountains and Washington's North Olympic Peninsula. I traveled to Transylvania to learn more about creating dark fiction and you'll see some of my practice in this blog. I hope my writing and art surprises you and keeps you coming back. Happy trails! Kay

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“I want to make time stretchier. I would like much more rubbery days, and I just wish that you could lean on a week, and sort of push the walls out a bit, and suddenly about nineteen extra days would rush in to fill the vacuum.

There is not enough time, and I wind up just wanting to do things that I don’t have time for. There are so many things that I’d love to do, and I have to put off, or that it’s a matter of me choosing, when really I’d love to do both. And if only time were infinitley stretchy, I could.” Neil Gaiman